Tradeshow Tuesday: Strategies for Taking High-Quality Videos

Get the five things you need to know to take quality videos while you are on the tradeshow floor.

Blog Post: 1/30/2018

Karen Cornelissen

Managing Editor, Gardner Business Media

All you need to create a high-quality video while you are at a tradeshow is your smartphone or tablet.

Here are five things that can help you create high-quality videos confidently on your smartphone or tablet while you are at an event:

1 “Content beats quality, every time.” -Hannah Coombs, project coordinator for Custom Content at Gardner Business Media. Just because you are not a professional videographer does not mean that you can’t take great videos. All you need is your smartphone or tablet and a little knowledge on how to take a decent video. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then video is worth 1,000,000, particularly on a tradeshow floor where companies are demonstrating so many interesting and cutting-edge technologies. Why tell someone about what you saw when you can show them? The good news is that most smartphones and tablets shoot videos in 1080p, which means that your smart device can shoot a high-quality picture.

“Content beats quality, every time.”

2 Holding the phone or tablet horizontally while filming maximizes what the camera can capture in the video. A horizontally shot video will help your clip look as good as possible in every platform where you may choose to post it. Social media platforms may apply white or black panels to the sides of a vertically filmed video to fit the video to the space that the platform allots for the video.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Filming

This is what the camera shows when an iPhone that is recording a video is angled vertically. Holding the phone or tablet this way limits the view of what the camera is able to capture. Sidebar images courtesy of Hannah Coombs.

This is what the camera shows when an iPhone that is recording a video is angled horizontally. This is how you want to take a video.

3 Careful consideration of things like sound, light and focus can help improve a video’s quality. Consider the sound and light quality when you are filming. The cameras on smartphones typically come with light settings that you can leverage to get the best picture quality for your project. For example, iPhones allow users to use a touch feature to adjust the light exposure in the frame. If the sound of something you are filming is essential, try to film somewhere quiet or stand close to what you are filming. If there is something specific within a frame that should be the focus, look for a focus option. iPhones have a feature that enables users to tap objects that they want the camera to emphasize.

Tap to Focus Feature in iPhone Camera

You can tap the screen on an iPhone before or during recording to bring up a focus box (shown here in yellow). You can then tap on the screen where you want the camera to focus.

4 Smart devices offer several video styles for creative content development. Look for features like slow-motion (which is great for capturing demos at shows) and time-lapse (which captures frames at a lower rate than they are played back, so time appears to move quickly in the video and therefore as if it is lapsing).

Example of a Time Lapse

Here is a time lapse I created at amerimold 2017. If you decide to create a time lapse video, film the footage very slowly. This gives the recording enough frames to cut the film down to a time lapse. Make a test time lapse video, and you’ll see what I mean!

5 You can edit videos on smartphones and tablets. Smartphones typically have a video editor in the camera or video app that enable users to trim the video to certain lengths or to cut out sections that you don’t want in the final product. This is helpful at a tradeshow when you need to be able to make quick edits to a video so that you can post your recording online quickly and straight from your phone or tablet. Each social media platform has length and file-size limits. Twitter, for example, allows videos ranging to 140 seconds (which is up from its previous limit of 30 seconds) and file sizes of 512 MB and smaller. Facebook allows longer videos of up to 45 minutes and files of 1.75 GB and smaller.